Joy in the Mourning
by Andi Horton
Summary: They don't quite fit, anymore. But even as they long for home, even as the city falls around them and mourning is the order of the evening, it's not impossible to find moments of joy.


Joy in the Mourning

O0O0O0O

His anger lasts only a moment. His favour lasts a lifetime. Weeping may last for the night, but there is a song of joy in the morning.

~ _Psalm 30:5_

O0O0O0O

It was Susan who carried the parcel; I would not trouble to mention the fact, except that she won the honour with hardly anything in the way of a fight, and one must see what an unusual thing this is when it comes to four children running an errand. When Mother had instructed the children to deliver some of the fabric scraps she'd had left over from cuttings for a quilt to Mrs Hobson, who lived four streets away, the first problem (as the children saw it) was who would get to carry them. They all liked Mrs Hobson, and so they all rather badly wanted to be the one to present her with the precious offering. However Susan had asked first, and although Edmund had scowled and Lucy had pouted (but only a very little) none of them argued with her, because they were no longer the sort of children who did such things.

They were not, in fact, ordinary children at all, although you would hardly have known it to see them in passing. They looked perfectly ordinary that afternoon, putting on their coats, shouldering gas-mask cases and promising Mother they would go directly there and come directly back with no detours, dawdling or avoidable delays. Mother kissed each of them once (and Lucy once more, because one simply couldn't help oneself when it came to Lucy) and if you had been watching very closely you might have had at most some little feeling, a small nudge in the back of your mind, that something about these four was not exactly ordinary, but you would probably have not been able to name what made you think so, and I am certain you could not have said why.

Peter held the door for his siblings as they left the house, and you might have found this odd, but probably nothing particularly extraordinary. He teased Lucy a little as they walked, and surely that is ordinary enough for any brother to do. He also made conversation with Susan —who seemed unable or unwilling to make conversation in return— and with Edmund, who was younger than Peter but who inclined his head toward his brother and fell into step and discussion with him as calmly and easily as if he were a man thrice his own years.

And there (for I will tell you, if you have not seen it already) is what made these four children just a little —really, just a _very_ little— different than all other children of their age you might have seen. They looked like children, they even mostly acted like them, but there was somehow, somewhere secret within them, something that made them seem —only sometimes— impossibly, inexplicably _adult_.

And yes, of course I know that lots of children make a game out of pretending to be more grown up than they really are (at one time Susan had been famously good at that) but if that was what I meant here, I would not even have troubled to mentioned it.

Look for yourself, if you don't believe me— there, in the way the two boys walk, stride for stride, talking as though they carried the weight of the world on their shoulders as a simple course of fact. Or see, just now, the way that Susan passes her hands over the little parcel she holds; she has lost her conscious, girlish pride in bearing it and for just this moment she looks like nothing so much as a woman on an errand, serene but purposeful. And there! Did you catch it? The smile on Lucy's face just a moment ago, the smile not of a guileless girl but rather a young lady, with secrets of her own.

Of course, these are not the sort of things people would see in children if they weren't first looking to find them, and at that moment, on that day, nobody was. So the children reached Mrs Hobson's house, they rang the bell and were greeted by the lady herself. Mrs Hobson was quite elderly —she had been already quite grown-up when Queen Victoria had died— but more than that she was soft and welcoming, a small, plump, pink-and-white person who smiled eagerly at them and insisted that they come inside for just a minute. This was not a delay that Mother would consider avoidable, so the children said they would be happy to visit for just a minute, and filed cheerfully into the little home that Mrs Hobson shared with her canary.

"Just a minute" in Mrs Hobson's world meant five minutes exactly (she knew how Mrs Pevensie would worry if they were gone any longer than that) but on this occasion only four of those five minutes had passed before the air-raid sirens went off.

"Oh!" Mrs Hobson jumped a little in her seat. "Oh, goodness— oh, children, your mother will worry. You must get home, quickly!"

This, though, was not an instruction that could be followed, since of course in the length of time it would take them to get home the children could have been struck by any number of bombs or falling walls, and all four of them knew it. So instead of heeding their hostess, the children all leaped to their feet and looked at each other. Then they looked to Peter.

"I'm afraid there's not time for us to go home, Mrs Hobson," he explained gently. "We'll all need to go to your Anderson, if you'll pardon the intrusion. Will you let the girls help you into the garden?" (for Mrs Hobson did not move very quickly) "I'm afraid we'll need to look sharp about it, too."

"Oh, my dear," Mrs Hobson said unhappily, "I don't have a shelter. Goodness, what does one woman alone want with an Anderson shelter? And in any event, who would build such a thing for me?"

"Well— a Morrison, then?" Peter ventured, though he had no idea how all of them would fit under such a thing. But Mrs Hobson did not even have a Morrison shelter.

"No, no," she shook her head, "I always go 'round the corner to my little church. They have a cellar, you know, and if it has stood for this long I expect it will stand for many years to come. A good number of us from around here often take shelter there. The vicar will be expecting me," she finished, and the way she said this sounded more as though this were a pre-arranged social call rather than a war measure.

"Then we'll help you there," Susan smiled, and she and Lucy got on either side of the lady, carefully helping her to her feet. Edmund lifted down the canary cage and Peter held the door for everybody until they were safely out, and then shut it fast behind him.

Poor Mrs Hobson could not move quickly at all, and you might have wondered to see four children, a canary in a cage and an elderly woman proceeding so slowly down the road. The evening sky was now lit with searchlights, and if you had looked —though why you'd want to I couldn't imagine— you might even have been able to make out the shapes of the German bombers as they advanced on London.

The little party had made it just over halfway to the church when it happened— a bomb dropped a street or two away detonated, and shook the buildings all around them with a fearsome rumble. The four children, Mrs Hobson (and Mrs Hobson's canary) were all knocked to the ground, and the houses around them shuddered dangerously.

Most of the houses were solid, well-built old things, and these lost at most perhaps a pane or two of glass. But in amongst these sturdy homes were newer ones, too, and these were not of such reliable make. It was on the ground in front of one of these houses that the party fell, and it was the shabbily-cemented chimney block of that house which gave way and went tumbling down off the roof at them.

"Peter!" Lucy screamed, and Peter saw at once where the danger lay. Lucy was already rolling onto her feet, with Edmund dragging her up and away, and Susan was standing too, but Mrs Hobson could not leap up as quickly as they. Susan was struggling to help her rise, but she was only a little girl, and the task of lifting even small, elderly women to their feet is not one well-suited to little girls on shaking London streets.

Peter did not even waste time shouting a warning but dove straight at his sister, knocking into Mrs Hobson as he did, half-shoving, half-rolling them both out of the way just as the chimney block crashed to the ground.

If Peter had simply pushed Susan and Mrs Hobson out of the way and taken their place himself, there is little chance he would have made it out from under that fearsome pile of brick. As it happened, though, he had shoved them and followed them himself, which meant that, although his lower half was quite buried in rubble, his head at least was clear and had been spared all but the most glancing blows.

Groaning, dazed, Peter tried to crawl forward from the brick pile, only to find that he was stuck fast. The boy looked down at his waist in vague irritation, and wondered if the fine story this would make later on could possibly be worth the aggravation it was giving him now, to say nothing of the distress it was causing his family.

"Peter!" Lucy cried again, darting in and struggling to lift the bricks away one at a time with her little hands. "Oh, Peter, are you alive?"

"Are you hurt?" Susan queried, still working to help Mrs Hobson into a fully upright position.

"Are you concussed?" Edmund asked, but with much more scientific curiosity than any genuine alarm. Peter glared at him, and Edmund grinned cheekily back. "Well, he's himself at any rate— see here, Lucy, stop that; you're only going to hurt yourself."

"But we've got to get him out!" Lucy cried, still struggling with the bricks. "They might drop a bomb on us at any minute, Edmund, how _can_ you be so calm?"

"Because," said Edmund (and there was about him for just a second that strange, grown-up look I have already mentioned) "I don't believe that we came back from . . . there just to die like this, here. Now let's look at this for a moment. We can't get him loose on our own; not in time, anyway. We're what, Mrs Hobson— about a minute's walk from the church? Two minutes? If that?"

"Yes, yes," Mrs Hobson nodded, "yes, it's quite close. Just around the corner, now."

"All right, then. Lucy, you're to run straight there and tell them what's happened in as few words as they'll let you, and send somebody back to help. Susan, you start to the church with Mrs Hobson. You need to get her safely inside. I'll stay here and do my best to dig out Peter."

They did not, of course, all just stand about and listen until Edmund was done. The moment she had her orders Lucy was off, bolting down the road as fast as her little legs would carry her. Susan had already gotten a firm grip on Mrs Hobson's arm when Edmund began addressing her, and by the time he was done they were turned around and starting toward the church as well. This left Edmund to smile quite fondly at his older brother, bend down, and set to shifting bricks. Peter, for his part, laid there and felt quite useless. He told Edmund as much.

"Yes, that's the spirit, Pete," Edmund nodded, "you save our sister's life and Mrs Hobson's too, and you narrowly escape death into the bargain, so naturally you're entitled to feel like one great, useless, waste of space." He shook his head and knocked a broken brick off Peter's arm. "Fathead."

"Always one for a pep talk, our Edmund," Peter grinned, then made a feeble, restricted effort to swing his head clear of Edmund's swatting hand. "All right, all right . . . by the Lion, Edmund how much of the blasted chimney is _on_ me?"

Edmund's hand stilled in the chill air for just a moment. When he resumed his work and spoke, his voice was low, and carefully steady.

"A lot of it. Most of it, actually. Hold still. Don't want you bringing more down on us." Then he lapsed into silence, and Peter belatedly realised what he'd said.

"Ed, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

"No, don't be. It's all right. Bound to happen, now and then; we're bound to slip, a bit. Best to do it when we're alone, rather than face explaining it."

"Even so." Peter wiggled an arm experimentally, and found he was not quite as pinned down as he had been a moment before. "Even so. I'll be more careful."

Edmund worked in silence a moment longer before he answered, his voice even lower and more consciously controlled than before.

"I wish you wouldn't."

"Edmund, we've already agreed—"

"I know. But I wish we hadn't. I wish we could talk about it, even a little. To even say his name . . ."

"We can't. We shouldn't. Mustn't. The professor said—"

"Oh, and easy for him to say, I'm sure! He said he was there all of what— a day? Two? I should find it very easy to hand down orders of silence and secrecy if two days were all I'd had. But he doesn't know, so he shouldn't speak to us as though he did."

"But maybe he does. We don't know for sure that he doesn't, do we? Maybe he went back. Or maybe there's somebody he . . . doesn't talk about it with, either. Too. Something."

"Maybe." Edmund wrestled another brick off his brother. "But I still don't think it gives him the right."

What Peter meant to reply to this will never be known, because before he could speak both boys heard a sudden shout from down the street, coming from the direction the girls and Mrs Hobson had gone. The shout was soon followed by the appearance of people, and an odd sort of group they made, too.

There was a short, wide man with a shiny head and bristling moustache who seemed to have assumed command of the rescue party. There was a tall woman with steely grey hair, a pleasant face and mis-matched shoes. There was a young man wearing spectacles, and there was a boy who seemed hardly much older than Peter himself. All of these were talking at great speed as they reached the boys, and Edmund found himself speedily sorted into one of two brick-removal brigades, each of which bent their every effort to uncovering enough of Peter that he might be pulled free.

"There he is!" the rotund man declared, once the shaken boy had been set on his feet. "All right, are you, lad? Yes, good, no bones broken, I trust? Your sister sent us along, of course, she's worried, they both are, and—" the distant, thunderous boom of another detonation cut the fellow off mid-sentence. "Yes, I suppose we'd best start back."

So they all set off down the street together; Peter found himself walking (rather more like running, really) alongside the round man, and Edmund was being hurried along by the lady, whose face was still kind even though her grip on his arm was a trifle snug.

"Here we are," the lady smiled, as they reached the little stone church. "Straight in, now, boys, and then directly down to the cellar. That's where everyone else is."

"Everyone else" the boys soon saw, not only included their sisters and Mrs Hobson, but also a few other children, their mothers, several elderly men and women, and a narrow man of middle age whose garb proclaimed him the vicar.

"Peter!" Lucy leaped up from her seat on a narrow bench along the wall and ran to catch her brother in a tight hug. "Oh, Peter . . . oh, good."

"Nice to be wanted, I must say," Peter grinned, and ruffled his little sister's already-tangled hair. "You're all right? Susan, you too?"

Susan was, and nodded to say so. Mrs Hobson sat beside her, a rather small and lost-looking little figure, and Peter made sure that she, too, was all right before he took another look around.

The cellar of the little church was clearly as old as the church itself. It was not a perfectly measured-off, squareish room, like most cellars you may have seen. It was a series of mostly-connected rooms that ran the length of the church; it had lumpy, rounded, rough walls and no windows at all. If you looked very closely at the walls you could even see the marks of shovel and pick, where people centuries before had worked to dig the area below the church. Peter, looking at these humble, ancient scrapes and scratches, felt a powerful jolt of recognition. He had seen such marks when they were yet new, and he had been friends with the men who had made them.

Turning away from the walls, he found Edmund watching him closely. One look at his brother's face told Peter that Edmund knew exactly what those walls had reminded him of, but Peter ducked his head and settled onto the bench at Susan's side.

"Mother will be worried," Susan murmured. She picked at a loose thread in her skirt, and Mrs Hobson patted the girl's hands reassuringly.

"She will know you have sense enough to come in out of an air-raid, I am sure," Mrs Hobson decided.

"Susan, maybe," Edmund nodded. "But she says _I_ haven't even sense enough to come in out of the rain."

Mrs Hobson looked confused a moment, then understood the statement to be the joke that it was and laughed. "Well," she smiled, "think how glad she will be to see you when you all come home." Then she looked around, and a small frown puckered her brow. "Why— where is my canary?"

The girls looked around as well, but Peter and Edmund traded stricken glances.

"When the bricks fell . . ." Edmund looked truly distraught. "Mrs Hobson, I'm sorry. I put the cage down to help Peter. I think . . . I think it must still be out there."

Mrs Hobson put one distressed, little hand to the base of her throat. Susan clutched sympathetically at the woman's other hand, and Lucy felt her eyes well up at the thought of the canary out there in a cage in the road as the bombs fell all around it. Before anybody could burst into actual tears, however, the grey-haired lady with the kind face stood up and spoke briskly.

"Well, I must say I could do with a song. Anybody have a suggestion to make? We're becoming positively gloomy in here."

It was just the sort of distraction they all needed. Some of the smaller children had already dropped off to sleep, but everybody else gladly fumbled along through a few verses of some of the more popular tunes. They didn't sound like anything too spectacular, but it made them all feel much better. Then the round man —whom people had been addressing as Mr Pike— found a few old hymnals buried in one corner, and these were shared round and everybody tried to do their best with the faded, water-spotted pages until their eyes protested, and the books had to be set aside.

Some more children and a few parents had dropped off to sleep as the singing was happening. Mrs Hobson's head was nodding against Susan's shoulder, and the boy who had come to dig them out was also sound asleep. The vicar remained awake, though, as did Mr Pike, the kind-faced lady (the vicar had addressed her once as Mary) the man with the spectacles and the four Pevensie children.

"We'd best not sing any more," Mary decided, nodding at the mostly-sleeping room. "But perhaps . . . Vicar, how about a psalm?"

The vicar brightened at the suggestion. However it proved that the only ones to have a Bible with them were he and Mary, and Mary, her eyes twinkling, said that surely hers would only serve as a source of confusion.

"Revised version, you see," she said. "Do forgive me, Vicar."

The vicar looked more amused than anything else, and said as far as he could see, an air raid called for every sort of imaginable adaptation, so why should the Revised and Authorised versions not manage to coexist at such a time?

"Why indeed," Mr Pike nodded. "Now, where shall we begin, eh? Take turns, that sort of thing, shall we? Read in rounds?"

It was a suggestion that they all adopted, and so Mary held hers open to one spot and began to read aloud.

"Blessed are they that are perfect in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, that seek him with the whole heart. Yea, they do no unrighteousness; they walk in his ways . . ."

She had a pleasant and soothing voice. Peter found his head drooping as well, and Edmund's shoulder was conveniently close, so he let his head droop against that. The reading went on, with Mr Pike taking a turn in his deep, round voice, and the man with the spectacles doing the same. Then Edmund found Mary's Bible pressed into his hands, and he picked up at the line where she had left off. He voice was cracked at first, from strain and fatigue, but as he went on the words smoothed out before him.

"My soul melteth for heaviness; strengthen thou me according unto thy word. Remove from me the way of falsehood and grant me thy law graciously. I have chosen the way of faithfulness; thy judgments have I set before me."

He swallowed, glanced around, then as swiftly as he possibly could, he passed the book along to Lucy. "Tickle in my throat," he murmured. The vicar nodded in understanding, and kindly picked up the reading where Edmund had left off.

The vicar's voice was, if possible, even more soporific than Mary's. He read the words with the gentle recognition of one old friend encountering another, and everybody seemed to take comfort in the vicar's voice and the words he spoke; there was a sweet, safe peace around all of them. Peter's eyes were now wholly closed. Edmund glanced down at his brother, and swallowed. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen Peter look so calm.

Lucy's turn came to read, and she squinted carefully at the printed page. "Remember the word unto thy servant," she read, "because thou hast made me to hope." Her sweet, thin voice struck each syllable like a music note. "This is my comfort in my affliction, for thy word hath quickened me. The proud have had me greatly in derision yet have I not swerved from thy law. I have remembered thy judgments of old, O Lord, and have comforted myself. Hot indignation hath taken hold upon me, because of the wicked that forsake thy law."

Edmund smiled at his sister. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining. She saw it too, he thought. She saw their story, peeking out at them from between every line of each verse. They could not speak it aloud, not even alone in ruined streets, but it was a secret they could carry in their hearts for always. And that, for now, would have to be enough. Lucy passed the book back to him, trembling with eagerness, her little finger pointing eagerly. He saw the line where she had left off, and had to smile.

"Teach me good judgment and knowledge; for I have believed in thy commandments. Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I observe thy word."

The two smiled at one another in wordless delight. Mary, watching them, tipped a thoughtful head to one side, but neither child noticed. Instead Mary's Bible was passed round from the children, and Susan took her turn. She started to read, but stumbled and could not finish even one line. "Princes—" she said, and choked. "Princes have persecuted me without a cause . . ." She looked up at Edmund in blank desperation, and some of his delight ebbed away.

"It's all right, Susan," he said awkwardly, and reached out to take the book away. "It— Susan, really. It's all right. I thought you might like to see . . ."

But Susan clearly did not like to see. She leaped up, trembling, and hurried away from the little group to a quiet corner of her own. She stood there, her arms wrapped around herself, and closed her eyes to shut out the room where she stood.

Edmund wanted to follow her, but he wasn't the sort of person who did such things. Lucy jumped up impulsively, but Mary got there ahead of them both, slipping past and walking over to the corner where Susan stood. She set a light hand on the girl's shoulder.

"Are you quite well, my dear?" she murmured. Susan ducked her head.

"Yes, thank you."

Mary did not move. Susan shuddered.

"No," she admitted, her voice quavering. "No, I'm not." She turned and lifted a chalky, pinched face to look at the elderly woman. "I want . . . I want to go home."

"The all clear will sound soon enough, I am sure."

"No, it . . ." Susan stopped, then shook her head. "Yes. Of course you're right. Thank you. I feel much better, now."

Mary raised one eyebrow, but said nothing. Susan hugged herself tighter, bowed her head, and willed the entire cellar to drop away. The distant echo of the bombs she desired be nothing more than the crash of the surf on the beach; the smell of damp that pervaded the basement she envisioned as the rich, loamy smell of her own garden within the tall, gracious walls of . . . but the words could not be spoken even in her head.

She squeezed her eyes shut and scrunched up her face. If only she _wished_ hard enough . . .

But when she opened her eyes, it was all the same, and Mary was watching her with such comprehending sympathy that Susan felt she just had to get _away_, had to run back to where Edmund and Peter and Lucy sat, and pretend there was nothing else in the world but they four. She curled up on the bench and tucked herself in against Lucy's warm little body, wrapping her arms around the stout waist and pressing her cheek to her sister's. Peter slept peacefully, and Edmund and Lucy were content. Only Susan was trembling, trying not to cry. Edmund's arm around Lucy reached out further, and his hand touched Susan, too. Then the four of them huddled there on the bench, squeezed into a tight little knot of oneness in their displacement.

"If we didn't come back to die," Susan whispered, "then why does it feel so much like we have?"

For this question, Edmund had no answer.

O0O0O0O

The all clear sounded just before dawn. People were mostly sleeping, but Mr Pike woke them all, and one by one they stretched, easing kinks in stiff muscles, looking around with sleep-smudged eyes, trying to remember where they were, and how they had come to be there, and why.

"We should go home," Susan murmured, rubbing at her face. "We should go home right away; Mother must be so worried."

"We should help Mrs Hobson home first, though," Lucy pointed out, but Mary overheard this and said no, the children didn't need to do that; she would be happy to oblige.

The children said that was very kind of her, and thanked her, and then together all six of them struggled up the stairs from the cellar, into the church and then out, into the streets. The grey dawn was lightening the sky as they began their walk down the street that would lead to Mrs Hobson's house, as well as to the road that would take the Pevensie children back home.

"I just hope Mum didn't run out looking for us," Edmund murmured, mostly to himself. Lucy looked up in alarm at this thought, and Susan was quick to catch her sister's hand and comfort her.

"Of course she wouldn't do that. Mother would know we found somewhere safe to stay. Edmund, please, must you say _everything_ that comes into your head?"

"Just you be glad that I don't," Edmund suggested, and Susan made a face at him, and suddenly, for just a moment, they were all children again.

Then Lucy gave a glad cry, staring down the road at something peeking out from behind a mound of rubble. They had come nearly to the point in the road where Peter had been trapped under the brick, and there, sitting beside the refuse as though it had been left there just minutes before, was the cage with the canary still inside.

"He's alive!" Lucy carolled, running the last few steps to grab up the cage and beam at the little bird inside. "Look at him, he's just fine!"

The canary's indignant twitters in reply to this observation suggested that he was not willing to concede he was "just fine" but Lucy, perhaps thankfully, could not understand what he was trying to tell her. She whirled on the weary, happy little group with a dazzling smile.

"Look, Mrs Hobson, he's alive!"

Mrs Hobson was looking, and she was weeping too; tears trickled down from the corners of her eyes as she put out one gnarled hand to greet the irritated little bird.

"He is," she sighed, "so he is . . . oh, thank you. What a mercy."

Since it would be she who saw Mrs Hobson home, it was Mary who took command of the bird cage. The six —now seven— of them set off once more in much brighter spirits than a moment before, and when they came to the place where they would part ways, Peter thanked Mary for escorting Mrs Hobson the rest of the way.

"Oh, not at all," she smiled. "It's quite all right; Mrs Hobson is an old friend. In fact I am afraid she must be quite sick of me after all these years!"

"Oh, I don't know," Mrs Hobson twinkled up at Mary, "I have rather gotten used to you, my dear. You know," she addressed the children, "I remember our Polly when she was no bigger than you! Just a snip of a girl, living on our street— a wild little thing she was, too, and that friend of hers, that grubby little boy, he was no better. And the stories she used to tell! The wildest tales you could imagine, about witches and magicians and oh, that lion! Properly besotted with that lion, Polly was . . . why, my dears, whatever is the matter?"

For the children looked as though they had all been slapped, or shaken, or maybe both. But none of them said anything, and for a minute neither did Mary, who was apparently also called Polly, although she did smile at them in such a way that they all suddenly wished they had another whole night and maybe a day as well to spend with her.

"You'll need to be running on home now, I think," she observed at last, and this jolted the children back to life.

"Yes, I— yes, thank you," Peter stammered, and then, feeling very dazed and not very much like anything on earth, the four turned and started for home. Behind them Mrs Hobson and Mary turned to do the same.

It was at that moment that the canary in the cage evidently decided that all was forgiven, for there burst forth from the depths of his golden throat the notes of a sweet, exuberant morning song. The melody trilled true and clear, rising up into the air, above the houses, above the columns of smoke and every sort of ugliness below. It broke joyously across the sky and scattered into musical drops of pure delight to welcome the coming dawn.

O0O0O0O

"And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things they say - even their looks - will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open."

_~The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** This makes the third of a series of seven one-shots that will be based on seven quotes my friend gave me. I had a very sad yet happy time writing this; it was wonderfully strange, to enjoy being mopey so much, and that odd contradiction was partly responsible for the title. This was originally meant to be called The Hiding Place, after a verse in Psalm 119, but something about that didn't quite fit. Then Psalm 30 was brought to my attention (Louise, you really are responsible for a lot of these lately!) and suddenly I knew exactly what play on words I wanted to use for the title. Also, if you're curious, the Psalm that everybody was reading was Psalm 119. It's a long one, but it really is neat how bits of it can apply to each of the Pevensies.

For more information on why (for the purposes of this story, anyway) the Pevensie children were brought back home from the Professor's house, feel free to do a quick search for "Phoney War" and/or "WWII evacuees" and you will see why some parents initially felt that the evacuation plans implemented in 1939 and early 1940 were unwarranted, and fetched their children back home.

For more of the Pevensie children themselves, you will need to read the books by the man who created them. I have no claim to them whatsoever, but seeing as CS Lewis has yet to pop up and order me to keep hands off, I boldly continue to risk his displeasure and play with them.


End file.
